Computer, Engineering and Design Snapshots

“CED in the Lower School is about students and teachers being comfortable users of technology resources. We learn by observing, experiencing, experimenting and doing,” said Jeffrey Adjei, Lower School Technology Teacher.

In the Middle School, CED courses are part of a quarterly rotation with visual arts, drama, and music courses each year. Below are some snapshots in different grades of our technology program.

In this project, Fourth Grade students combine art and technology to create an art piece. In art class, fourth grade students first create designs using black permanent marker. Once their drawings have been scanned, they optimize them in Adobe Effects by cropping, darkening and touching them up to get them ready for the laser cutter. Finally, the laser cutter traces their drawings to create their shapes out of wood for the final piece.

In Fifth Grade, students have opportunities throughout the year to make informative videos. For this project, they focused on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Students conducted research online about MLK, then put together their videos using the BrainPop’s Make-A-Movie module. Students use images provided by BrainPop and then narrate their own story over the images to make their movies.

In Sixth Grade, students create social based games in Scratch in their Computer, Engineering & Design course. Examples of games students have created include a choose your own adventure style game, a game that advocates for more sports in school, and one where you must overcome a bully to win. Students use the Scratch programming language to build loops and other block coding elements to make their games work.

In Eighth Grade, students design their own unique products to solve a problem they see in the world. In designing their product, students must factor in cost, materials, qualitative research and also design a 3-D model of the product in TinkerCad. Products have included a one size fits all bed to a battery recharger to a sustainable redesign of charms for shoes. They ultimately use a 3-D printer and recyclable materials to create a prototype of their product.